


the root of the root

by Maiden_of_the_Moon



Series: a return to eden [2]
Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Artist Nathaniel, F/M, Feelings, Inspired by Poetry, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23147929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maiden_of_the_Moon/pseuds/Maiden_of_the_Moon
Summary: The pyre burns with the misery of passion. She does not try to stop it.
Relationships: Bartimaeus/Kitty Jones, Bartimaeus/Kitty Jones/Nathaniel, Bartimaeus/Nathaniel (Bartimaeus), Kitty Jones/Nathaniel
Series: a return to eden [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1568605
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	the root of the root

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CsMelody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CsMelody/gifts), [Lysandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysandra/gifts).



> Disclaimer: A whole lot of nope. 
> 
> Author’s Note: Dammit, I have so many other things to be doing.
> 
> Warnings: Questionable editing, etc. Intended to be slipped into my “a return to eden” series, but can also be read alone. Be warned and beware, for here there be quotes. So many, many italicized quotes. They include bits from “The Epic of Gilgamesh;” e.e. cummings’ “I Like My Body When It Is With Your Body” and “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)]”— the latter of which I took the title from; Nietzsche; “Ptolemy’s Gate;” the Bible; my own fics; and just… lots of stuff. 
> 
> Enjoy your pretentious purple prose. :’)

\---

the root of the root

\---

“Miss Jones, may I have a word?”

Ms. Piper sounds tired. Perpetually tired. Profoundly, indescribably _tired_ , having had only the odd hour or two of sleep since the government’s near total collapse. Hers is a marrow-deep perversion of weariness, malignant and pervasive, a cancer without a cure; to close one’s eyes is to invite the dreams, and Kitty knows that Ms. Piper has no desire to face any nightmare beyond that of rebuilding the entire political infostructure from literal ashes. 

_Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Glass and crystal and bone reduced to a dazzling, glittering powder._

Kitty is also tired. Her body is a marionette rebelling against its puppeteer. Her world is a burst pustule, draining but far from healed. Her patience is not what once it was, which is unfortunate, as its fuse was never long to begin with. 

“Perhaps one,” Kitty grants, motioning to the seat across from her. Ms. Piper takes it, and a moment. 

Golden light suffuses through high windows, clinging to their contours with the sticky resplendence of silk. For a minute, they simply exist in the same space, in the same time, in the same unescapable cocoon of exhaustion.

_Before it can become a butterfly, a caterpillar must destroy itself. Ruin begets rebirth._

Kitty tells herself that she is thinking about history and its regimes. 

She is a terrible liar when she is tired. 

“Well?” 

“Well. Miss Jones, if you’d be so kind…” 

Without explanation, Ms. Piper drops a manila envelope into the empty space between them. It is of a considerable size: smaller than the atlas over which Kitty had poured during their prior meeting, but not by much. It is hardly any thinner, either. 

Under Ms. Piper’s guidance and Kitty’s vigilant eye, the packet traverses from one end of the table to the other, moving in a fashion redolent of ancient ships: boldly, but slowly, worried about what might be lurking over the world’s edge. 

_Here there be monsters. There will always be monsters._

“He didn’t have much. In regards to personal effects, that is,” Ms. Piper offers in way of elucidation. In lieu of an apology. “Which is, I suppose, somewhat auspicious, given that he had no family upon whom to bequeath anything. The majority of his property— the books, the paraphernalia— will be reabsorbed into the ministry, or donated, or perhaps saved for future museum exhibits, but…” 

An open gesture prompts an open envelope. An open stare. Gargoyles stare back, along with buffalos, birds, serpents, smogs; a young teen in a loincloth, a girl with slightly exaggerated proportions.

Kitty frowns, unsure what she is looking at, precisely. 

She is, however, sure of precisely _who._

“This is…?” 

“It seems that, in private, Mr. Mandrake was quite the artist,” Ms. Piper murmurs, still sounding so _tired_. Perpetually, profoundly, but now less indescribably: what Kitty hears in her voice is the enervation of loss, the emotional rot that follows prolonged mourning. Her every word decays from the inside-out, hollow shells and empty husks left where once there had been zeal, and excitement, and _life_. “I couldn’t bring myself to throw such lovely work away, but it didn’t seem right to keep it, either. I was merely his assistant. However… I thought— that is, seeing as you were one of his models… I thought, perhaps, he might want _you_ to have them.” 

“You’re wrong.” 

_i like my body when it is with your  
body. It is so quite new a thing._

The veins in Kitty’s hands are more pronounced after her journey: a trim of regal blue. It is a stately figure that she cuts, magnificent upon her motheaten throne, crowned by shining motes and guarded by stacks of poetry. 

Atop a collection by Cummings, the drawings are tenderly abandoned. A verse is echoing over and over in her mind, its beauty no more her own than the face on the top of that pile. 

_It is so quite new a thing._

“You’re wrong,” Kitty says once more, with a conviction that she had not realized she yet possessed. “I have no right to these, either.” 

Magicians are a pragmatic bunch. For all their ostentation, the possessions in their keep are always practical; there is no need for the distraction of sentimentalities. But this week has been long, and Mandrake’s life short, and maybe Rebecca Piper is more maudlin than most, for this is the straw that breaks her heart. “But—!”

But. 

( _here is the deepest secret nobody knows_ )

“But,” Kitty interrupts, gentle, as she nods in agreement with something left unsaid, “I know to whom they _do_ belong.”

-

The blue of his eyes is the most human thing about him. It is also the most uncanny.

“I can’t take these with me.” 

Vaguely, they remind Kitty of her old community pool: a cold, distorted facsimile of something once-natural. Something once-innocent, once-wonderful. She shivers, sensing the depths of him in the same way one does the fathoms beneath their toes, and finds herself fearing all those nameless, ravenous things that hide below smooth surfaces— those primordial feelings that hunger for blood. 

_So much for your promises._

Kitty does not want to be here. She does not want to maintain his gaze. She is floating, half-drowned; she is floundering and hates it. But—

But. 

( _here is the deepest secret nobody knows_ )

But Kitty is self-aware enough to realize that, should she leave, she would not be able to take this plunge again. 

“That’s not why I’m giving them to you,” she tells him. 

Bartimaeus says nothing. 

In so doing, Bartimaeus says everything. 

His puppet’s fingers are slender where they curl around the drawings. His pinky bears the remnants of an ink smudge; there is a healing paper cut carved into his index. The subtle craquelure of his flesh— its whorls and folds and prophetic lines— are details that Kitty despises almost as much as she does his eyes. 

Neither have looked away. Stubbornly, bitterly, Bartimaeus and Kitty preserve this last bit of contact: tighten this unwanted tie. Because it is more intimate than the chain of an antediluvian spell, more binding than the runes that ring their pentacles, more personal than any connection has a right to be when one of the two involved is not a “person” at all. 

_And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you._

“…fine.”

The djinni needs not, and so does not, blink. He needs not, and so does not, cry. He needs not, and yet chooses to, quietly intone: to breathe life into a language long-dead, its words ghosting over Kitty’s skin even at a distance.

They are worlds, epochs, inches apart. Further. Closer. Closer still, both caught in the gravity of the same chalked star. And all the while, the soliloquy trickles— warm and dry, in trails and tails— as sand would through an hourglass. 

_Why wouldn’t my cheeks look sunken, my face gaunt?  
Why wouldn’t my heart be broken, my appearance wrecked?  
Why wouldn’t my gut churn in despair?  
Why wouldn’t my face seem world-weary?  
Why wouldn’t I look scorched by sleet and sun,  
prowling the wilderness, dressed like a predator?_

Sentiment, sacrament, sacrifice. Religious ritual often revolves around triads, and as far as Kitty can tell, this impromptu ceremony is no exception. Briefly, she marvels at the sanctity with which Bartimaeus has imbued his observance: as if her dingy bedroom were some holy mosque or shrine, worthy of hosting a king’s funeral. 

This is a rite, a privilege to witness. This is an allusion, though she cannot say to what. 

_How could I keep quiet? How could I, of all people, fall silent?  
My friend, the one I love, has turned to clay._

The fire, when it begins, is Pentecostal. It alights upon the brow— sallow paper turning umber turning russet turning black— the growing flame as destructive as it is purifying. In the time it takes to gasp, half the stack is already stardust, embers fading like forgotten wishes upon the altar of the djinni’s hands. 

Staring into that blaze, Kitty wonders at the many ways a hand can be warmed. She wonders if Nathaniel ever knew such warmth. She wonders about the questions she cannot ask, all the things that will never be said, as a red tongue licks into a graphite mouth. As it swallows smiling lips and consumes a kohl-lined face. 

And suddenly— viscerally— Kitty understands. 

_Djinn are beings of fire; they love as the flame does the forest._

The pyre burns with the misery of passion. 

She does not try to stop it.

-

His eyes are the most human thing about him. They are also the most uncanny.

It is because they are Nathaniel’s. 

From the curvature of his lashes to the veins lacing his sclera, from the frill surrounding his pupil to the shadows in his irises’ crypts— gloaming-blue, like summer twilights— they are Nathaniel’s, 

_they are Nathaniel,_

soot-stained and woebegone and alive, so very _alive_. Kitty’s heart skips a beat to watch him inhale, exhale, inhale again, the last of the heady smoke vanishing as it spirals into his lungs. 

For as long an eternity as he can manage, he holds those final vestiges of ash and dust inside himself: greedily, wretchedly, desperately. Unsinged palms smear darkness down thin cheeks, over a thinner chest; the sketches’ charcoal remains crumble into nihility around his feet, and he looks at her like the aftermath of a tragedy. Like the phoenix as it rises. 

_I am Nathaniel._

But—

But. 

( _here is the deepest secret nobody knows_ )

But the moment that she kisses him— greedily, wretchedly, desperately— Kitty remembers the truth. She remembers, and she aches, and she _grieves_ , but she _does not stop_ —

Because Bartimaeus kisses her back.

\---


End file.
